The journey of a log — Day 3: A family of loggers

The livelihood of generations of Woollends is woven into the fabric of the Cariboo forests

B.C. timber harvesting is dramatic and controversial. It changes the landscape. West Fraser Mills tries to reduce its impact on the environment. This video looks at the forest industry near Quesnel where it has the heaviest concentration of manufacturing found anywhere in North America.
Part of a six-day series - Journey of a Log: A story of the forest and the people whose lives it shapes. A feature tracing a log from its origins in the forest to a finished product.

QUESNEL —As the long spring days of June dry out the heavy clay soils of the Cariboo, “Paradise Time” draws to a close for logging contractor Derek Woollends and his family.

Paradise Time, explains his wife Amanda, is those weeks between breakup, when the spring thaw first sets in, until the sun has coaxed sufficient moisture out of the forests to make the land firm enough for the heavy equipment used in logging. It’s a window when, with the brutally cold working conditions of the winter season behind them and the summer working season yet to begin, the young family of four heads for an exotic location.

Pictures of previous vacations in Thailand pepper the kitchen refrigerator. This year, accompanied by sons Isaac, 9, and Tristan, 2, they headed for Israel and scuba diving in the Red Sea.

The hard work schedule, when Derek is up before 4 a.m. and back home at dusk, can be forgotten for a few weeks.

When I caught up with the Woollends, Derek had just returned to work, cutting the right-of-way for West Fraser’s new main line logging road.

Derek is going to harvest our log.

He operates W.V. Falloon Contracting, the logging business owned by his dad, Rusty, who is gradually turning the company over to his son.

Derek is confident about this year’s work schedule, and has invested $2 million in new equipment for the family-owned business. It’s a huge but necessary risk. The near-term future is bright. The stirrings of recovery in the U.S. housing market mean the demand for timber will be strong for the next few years.

But he only has to look out the window to the back of his five-acre property to see the long-term future. The pine, spruce and fir forest that borders his field is riddled with dead, blackened trees.

Of all the stories in our narrative of a log, the tale of the people and families whose lives depend on the timber harvest is the most moving and unsettling. Lives are woven into the forest in a relationship that is generations old. As the forest dies, one thing is certain: Their lives will change. Amanda worries about that.

Defying stereotypes

As the pine decays to the point that its value for sawlogs is gone, West Fraser, the forest company that hires Woollends, will see its allowable annual cut reduced. The chief forester of B.C. estimates the harvest in Quesnel’s Timber Supply Area could drop by as much as 40 to 60 per cent as the provincial government works to maintain a sustainable timber supply.

The big question, said Allan Bennett, West Fraser’s forestry supervisor, is when those cuts will come into effect.

Woollends’s share of the harvest will drop proportionately. And he will have to travel further from home to find work.

Next week, he will be out in the Blackwater region west of Quesnel, harvesting a stand of dead pine that West Fraser forester Eric Kishkan has previously identified as containing just enough sawlog timber to justify the cost of harvesting it and returning the site to productivity.

W.V. Falloon has been in the logging business in the Cariboo since 1955.

It’s one of just a handful of companies that has remained in business and locally owned during several boom-and-bust cycles.

And now, with the industry looking stronger, Woollends has prepared by financing new equipment to ensure breakdowns don’t compromise his ability to deliver logs on schedule.

The Woollends family defies the stereotype of loggers that is held by many urbanites. Derek is quiet, but his sharp eyes miss nothing. He is tall, slim and his warm smile is disarming. Amanda is an accomplished artist and photographer. She stays at home raising the two children on their five-acre property on the west side of the Fraser River.

She is home-schooling Isaac, and she and Derek take in every music concert that comes to town.

“We don’t get to hear the symphony like you can, any time you want,” she says. “We miss that.”

Slick operation

At 7 a.m. the next morning, Woollends is 35 kilometres east of Quesnel working on the road right-of-way. Father Rusty has joined him. They are in a mixed forest of spruce, pine and fir, typical of the Cariboo east of the Fraser River.

The pine is dead. A new road is being built through this part of the sub-boreal forest to avoid the potential of a slide on the existing main line. Geological engineers have detected a slow but gradual movement of the land above the road. If it were to slide, it could be environmentally damaging and economically costly to the company. The prudent course is to relocate the road and decommission the old one.

Today, the job is felling timber along the right-of-way, hauling it by skidder and piling it in a “deck” — the industry term for an orderly pile of logs — close to the roadhead. Derek operates the skidder. The main job, operating a $600,000 piece of equipment called a feller buncher, is to be done by veteran Jeff Christen.

A feller buncher is the forest industry’s ultimate machine, being both a beautiful and dreadful expression of this province’s resources sector. Mounted on a set of giant tracks, it is all engine and cab, with a hydraulically powered boom mechanism that supports a two-tonne steel grapple and a 24-inch circular cutting blade.

It can grab a tree and saw through it in a matter of seconds. A secondary pair of bunching arms can hold several stems at once while the saw slices through a second, third, fourth or even fifth tree. After cutting, Christen lifts the trees skyward, rotates the head and boom as he does so, and lays the trees parallel to his direction of cut. It’s done as gently as if he were laying a baby in a crib.

The feller buncher grinds its way through the forest — the first step in turning living trees into a commodity — with the power and inevitability of modern technology confronting the natural world. Christen can cut 3,000 trees in a day, depending on their size. An average day’s count is about 1,500.

As awesome as the machine is, it is actually mimicking one of the effects on the landscape of fire or windstorms. The soil surface needs to be slightly disturbed to encourage the next crop of trees.

Unlike on the Coast, the Cariboo soil is much the same today as it was after the glaciers: mineral-rich till covered by a thin layer of organic matter referred to as the forest floor. Fire burns this organic material, exposing the mineral layer where the next generation of seedlings will take root. If the soil surface is not disturbed during logging, often a second machine is brought in to do it, preparing the site for the next crop of conifers.

Ready for the mill

Christen approaches our log, a large Douglas fir, and makes the first cut. It’s a big tree, 32 inches in diameter, and larger than the circular saw, so it will require a second cut. Christen manoeuvres his machine to the other side of the tree and within seconds has grabbed it and made the second cut. The tree sways, then as Christen works his twin joysticks inside the cab, it swooshes down, striking the earth with a whump. A cloud of dust instantly envelopes tree and machine, but already the whine of the circular blade can be heard cutting through another tree, this time a dead pine.

W.V. Falloon’s job is to cut the timber, haul it from the bush, deck it, and process it into logs. The final step is done by a machine the size of the feller buncher with the innocuous name of “processor.” It strips the trees of their limbs and cuts them into the lengths desired by the mill with lightning speed.

Derek Woollends grabs our log with a skidder, a super-sized tractor with a grapple, and hauls it several hundred metres down the right-of-way to the log deck. Within three weeks, it will be loaded onto a truck and delivered to West Fraser’s Quesnel sawmill, the world’s largest.

Story Tools

The Woollends family, Derek and Amanda with children Isaac, 9, and Tristan, 2, slice into a homemade pie at their home in Quesnel. Derek works long hours for much of the year, making any time he can spend with his family even more special.

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